Making Cyclists Heard On The Road In Mexico City

The hustle and bustle of Mexico City leaves cyclists feeling “invisible”, which is putting people off cycling. Local design agency José de la O have created a fun, musical prototype to help lessen the fear of cycling and get more people on their bikes.

Local government in Mexico City is providing infrastructure to facilitate cycling around their busy city as bikes are becoming more and more popular. ECOBICI is a public bicycle-docking service, much like Santander Cyclers (Boris Bikes to many of us), that has been provided by the government for the past seven years. Thomas Hoogewerf, an intern at Studio José de la O, decided to conduct research as part of their Project Friday Initiative (part of the agency’s intern program where every intern develops a speculative or critical design project every Friday for six months, which they can then publish in their portfolio), that looked into how the service could be improved based upon people’s experiences. It turned out that one of the key issues that the interviewees found with cycling in Mexico City is that “people don’t notice you, you are not present enough”.

Case Study 1: Rhythmic Percussion

Case Study 2: Wind Sound

Case Study 3: Percussion & Friction

On this basis, Hoogewerf and his colleague Judit Parés ran a design experiment to create a novel device that helps to protect cyclists by letting the rest of the traffic become aware of the cyclist’s presence in a much more pleasant and powerful way than your average bicycle bell. They created DIY contraptions form regular household bits and pieces that can create a “a constant rhythmic and analogue sound”, whilst you cycle.

The duo have created three different DIY contraptions, which they have given the self-descriptive titles “Rhythmic percussion, Wind Sound and Percussion and Friction”. All three designs create a “pleasant soundscape where the cyclist goes”, which sounds much nicer than the angry drrring of bicycles here in Amsterdam.

This is a simple idea that brings together the serious side of encouraging sustainable transport, by protecting cyclists with the fun side of playful design. Furthermore, the imagery they are using to demonstrate their design is pretty neat. Kudos to the design team, we like it!

StreetMix.net is a digital mixing board for the urban environment. It invites its users to create, mix and mash a streetscape with a wide array of typical road elements, such as bike and vehicle lanes, medians, boulevards, sidewalks and trees.

GPS drawing is hot. On Spoon & Tamago (great blog for Japan enthusiasts) we came across the Tokyo Zoo Project, a website that builds upon this idea as it transforms Tokyo’s map into one big zoo of GPS-drawn animals. The project, powered by Sony, presents a series of cycling routes around the Japanese capital that trace outlines of different animals, such as a panda that covers Shibuya and a big gorilla that crosses the city’s Haneda district.

You’d probably not expect it here, but in the relatively unknown Chinese city of Kashgar the electric scooter is emerging quickly as a dominant means of transport. How come that the electric scooter is doing so well in Kashgar while the rest of the world still suffers from dirty ‘regular’ scooters? Can we actually learn something from the ‘Kashgar Approach’?

Here at our urban design office Golfstromen we just finished our newest project. For the Police Department of the City of Rotterdam, we did the creative direction and principal design for the 10,000 Eyes campaign. The campaign consists of 10,000 eyes that were left in public space in the Rotterdam district of Delfshaven. The main…